— Decentralization has emerged as an important instrument of environmental and development policy in the last two decades. Presumed benefits of environmental policy decentralization depend in significant measure on broad participation in the programs that governments create to decentralize decision making related to resource management. This paper uses data from protected areas in Nepal’s Terai...

Do better informed people vote more? Recent theories of voter turnout emphasize a positive effect of being informed on the propensity to vote, but the possibility of endogenous information acquisition makes estimation of causal effects difficult. I estimate the causal effects of being informed on voter turnout using unique data from a natural experiment Copenhagen referendum on decentralization...

This paper examines the residential location and school choice responses to the desegregation of large urban public school districts. We decompose the well documented decline in white public enrollment following desegregation into migration to suburban districts and increased private school enrollment, and find that migration was the more prevalent response. Desegregation caused black public en...

OBJECTIVE To describe how district-wide access to HIV/AIDS care was achieved and maintained in Thyolo District, Malawi. METHOD In mid-2003, the Ministry of Health and Médecins Sans Frontières developed a model of care for Thyolo district (population 587, 455) based on decentralization of care to health centres and community sites and task shifting. RESULTS After delegating HIV testing and c...

Even though several studies have assessed the degree of progressivity in targeting communities under the participatory Social Investment Fund (SIF) approach to the provision of local public goods, there is yet little evidence on how increasing decentralization affects the quality of this targeting. We identify the impact of increasing decentralization on community targeting using the unique sit...

This thesis analyzes the state of educational decentralization in Vietnam with the purpose to analyze how education has been decentralized in Vietnam; and if it has been in accordance with the purpose of the international development institution present in Vietnam. The thesis presents a theoretical framework over public decentralization and educational decentralization. The theoretical framewor...

BACKGROUND During the Suharto era public funding of health in Indonesia was low and the health services were tightly controlled by the central government; district health staff had practically no discretion over expenditure. Following the downfall of President Suharto there was a radical political, administrative and fiscal decentralization with delivery of services becoming the responsibility ...